I get up in the morning looking for an adventure. — George Foreman

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#16: Surprise trip planned by Ben – Cancun

In our family, Becky is the primary adventure planner. She’s so good at it, but it’s also hard work, so every year she challenges me to step into her shoes and plan an adventure for the two of us. This year we went to Cancun.

I have a history of being overly ambitious with our year-end trips. When I plan them in September or October, I fully expect that we can hit the ground running, drink in the place we’re going to, and not rest until the plane ride home. The reality is that, after a month and a half of non-stop holiday shopping and parties and pressure and craziness, what we really need is a vacation, where we can relax, enjoy some food, and recharge.

I originally booked us into an Airbnb in the downtown area, where there was lots of exploration to be done, and not too many tourists. What we discovered after we landed, got to our place at 8pm, exhaustedly ate burgers from the shack down the street, went to bed, and got up at what felt like 1:15am to our PST bodies to visit Chichen Itza, was that we were already exhausted, and was only the first day.

So we cashed in some credit-card points and reserved a room at the Casa Turquesa in the hotel zone. Once we settled there, we found that it was possible to relax and have a good time, instead of trying to plan a trip to Walmart. We went kayaking, took two food tours (that turned out to be from the same company), caught up on sleep, planned our year, and did a lot of reading and recharging.

I should write a few things about our hotel room. Looking at these photos, it looks beautiful, romantic, scenic, and relaxing. The reality of staying there is… a little different. You see, Casa Turquesa is also an art museum, and from the looks of it, they specialize in the nude female form – 90% of the statues and paintings (which were everywhere) were of naked ladies. There’s also an air of run-downedness about the place. Everything is cracked, chipped, and water-stained. The air conditioner vent dripped condensation onto our faces in the night. The steel storm curtain flapped in the wind all night long, I had to prop it with a deck chair so we could sleep. The balcony jacuzzi didn’t have a plug for the drain. The internet was so slow it was painful to check Instagram. There was a piece of tape on the floor in the elevator lobby that only moved 5 feet in the entire time we stayed there. Our 4th-floor room flooded during a storm because the balcony door didn’t shut.

But even when our buckets are empty, we’re not overly bothered by these things. We were just glad to be able to wake up to the sound of the waves crashing, spend an hour reading, then wander down for breakfast, and take a short taxi ride to our next adventure. It turned out great. And now that we know what kind of mood we’ll be in at the end of the year, maybe we won’t have to re-plan in the middle of a trip again.